The Justice Department’s actions signal that the Trump administration plans to maintain government scrutiny of the tech industry. Apple, Meta and Amazon also face antitrust lawsuits from the US government, with Meta in the second week of a trial over whether it illegally stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they were young companies.
The case over Google search was filed in 2020, under the first Trump administration. In 2023, Mehta oversaw an eight-week trial in which the government argued that Google had subverted competition by striking deals to be the preselected search engine in web browsers and on the home screens of smartphones. The company paid $26.3 billion to companies including Apple and Samsung as part of those deals in 2021.
The government said those deals locked in Google’s control, putting its search engine in front of consumers looking for information, which gave the company more data to improve its search engine. That then attracted more consumers, entrenching the company’s dominance, the government said.
Google countered that consumers chose its search product simply because it was better than competitors such as Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo. The company also said it invested constantly to make its search engine the best.
Mehta ultimately sided with the government. That kicked off a process to determine how to fix the competitive issues caused by Google’s monopoly.
The Justice Department has asked for wider changes that would restrict Google’s ability to reach users and give its competitors resources to compete with its search engine. It wants Mehta to stop the company from making payments to browser makers and smartphone manufacturers to give its search engine prime placement.
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It has also asked Mehta to preserve the ability to force Google to sell Android, its smartphone operating system, if the remedies do not restore competition.
“Chrome is a significant gateway to search,” said Dahlquist, adding that billions of dollars in search revenue flows through the widely used browser. “The divestiture of Chrome, when finalised, will give rivals access to a significant number of search queries to help compete with Google.”
The government has also asked Mehta to force Google to syndicate its search results and ads feed to its competitors, as well as provide other search engines with additional data they could use to improve their products.
Google said the request amounted to a giveaway for its rivals. The government’s proposal is “a wish list for competitors looking to get the benefits of Google’s extraordinary innovations and trade secrets that we’ve spent decades developing,” Schmidtlein said.
Mehta asked questions throughout the opening statements. He pushed the government on whether existing court decisions supported its far-reaching proposal.
The government has encouraged Mehta to think ahead to the battle for ownership of a technological era that may be defined by AI. Dahlquist said the judge must ensure Google cannot use its search monopoly to gain control of the market for AI and said the company was already taking steps to ensure the dominance of one of its marquee products, its Gemini chatbot.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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